I nearly died from H1N1. I can tell you this: Social distancing is the best potion we have to fight the coronavirus in Wisconsin.

Aaron Olver | Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Like Harry Potter, my most prominent scar is tingling these days. Mine is a tracheotomy scar on my throat from the tube for the mechanical ventilator that saved my life.

In 2009, the H1N1 viral pandemic nearly killed me. I’ve lived through the care the sickest COVID-19 patients will need, and I’m here to tell you that social distancing through Gov. Tony Evers' “safer at home” order is the only chance we have.

In 2009, when I traveled to California to accept an award on behalf of the State of Wisconsin, I was a healthy thirty-something who exercised regularly with zero underlying health issues. I took four flights there and back, attended a conference, gave a speech, and shook countless hands.

Somewhere along the line, I contracted H1N1.

After spending a week sick at home, I went to the emergency room and was admitted. The last thing I remember is messaging my team at work to let them know I’d be out one more day. Two days later, I was in a medically-induced coma, intubated, and on a mechanical ventilator.

The potential shortage of ventilators and the tragic choices that medical professionals will have face if hospitals are overrun has been widely covered. The actual situation, though, is worse.

The University Hospital Trauma and Life Support Center, where I was, is a 24-bed ICU. The day I arrived, Dr. Dennis Maki, one of the world’s top infectious disease experts, happened to be on rotation. I not only had a ventilator, but a fancy bed that rotated to clear fluid from my lungs, one-on-one nursing care, and, literally, some of the best doctors in the world.

Today, we lack the resources to provide the average COVID-19 patient with this level of care. And as medical providers become ill, it will get worse.

Many patients can’t tolerate being on a mechanical ventilator while conscious. I was given Midazolam, a sedative, Vecuronium, a paralytic, and Fentanyl, a morphine substitute. As I developed tolerances to these drugs, my dosage had to be increased. In March, demand rose by more than 50% for ICU drugs like these, and the Food and Drug Administration declared shortages.

As my condition worsened, my kidneys began to fail. Doctors put me on emergency dialysis machines, sometimes for 24 hours at a time. I’ve read articles suggesting that kidney specialists are estimating that 20 percent to 40 percent of COVID-19 patients that enter the ICU will need dialysis. Some hospitals are experiencing shortages of dialysis machines and the fluids needed to run them.

After recovering, I spent an extra three unnecessary nights taking up a bed in the hospital over a weekend solely because of arcane federal rules that required the hospital to secure an outpatient dialysis slot before discharging me. Three percent of Wisconsin coronavirus cases are in an ICU right now. If a third survive and 30 percent of those need dialysis, we’ll need to round up one dialysis slot for every 350 diagnosed COVID-19 patients. Once we solve ventilators and PPE, dialysis will be next.

After I woke up, nearly a month after first being intubated, I weighed 30 pounds less and could hardly walk. The first time I tried, it took two nurses holding my arms, a tank of oxygen, and midpoint rest break to make it 100 feet. My prognosis improved from “might die” to “might never work again” to “may need to move to a nursing home to learn to walk again.” I was young, healthy, and luckier than that. But some COVID-19 survivors are going to need that kind of rehabilitation.

When you wake up from being on a ventilator, they give you anti-psychotic drugs to fight “ICU psychosis.” It’s real. I had the worst, vivid nightmares of my life, which I still remember 10 years later. You can’t talk because of the trach tube. You have no idea what’s real and no way to ask, hands too shaky and weak to even write. Thankfully, I had a stream of friends and family to help pull me out. Coronavirus patients who survive the ICU will wake up alone, confused, and, likely, terrified.

Then there’s the mental recovery. My first real outing after leaving the hospital was to see the movie "Avatar." I had to lean against the walls to make it my seat and once there, fought panic the entire film. I thought it was just the movie. The next night, I watched a comedy from my couch and had the same irrational, over-the-top anxiety. I realized I was overreacting to the smallest of threats, even ones I knew were fictional. ICU-related PTSD, as I came to learn, is common in more than 25% of survivors. COVID-19 survivors may need mental health services.

My experience was horrible in many ways, but I fell ill during a time when our health care system had every tool available to me, and largely because of that, I lived.

I’ve spent my entire career working to create jobs and grow the economy, from plotting growth strategy as a McKinsey consultant to serving as Wisconsin’s Secretary of Commerce. Today I run University Research Park where companies like FluGen are hard at work on vaccines and Exact Sciences is joining the COVID-19 diagnostic effort. I want to open the economy as badly as anyone.

But there’s no magic elixir or Hogwarts spell. Unfortunately, we can’t simply wave a wand and conjure effective therapies and a vaccine. Instead, we all have to work together, to stretch our health care resources as far as they will go while buying time for scientists to search for a cure. Social distancing has caused severe economic pain, both for individuals and nationwide, but for now, “safer at home” policies are the only potion we have in the fight against COVID-19.

Aaron Olver is managing director of University Research Park in Madison. He is the former state Secretary of Commerce under former Gov. Jim Doyle.